Moloch’s Clerics

A stalking-horse is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a horse,
either real or painted on a canvas, behind which a hunter conceals himself to
get close to his prey. For the past 70 years, Planned Parenthood (PP) has been
using willing members of the Christian clergy as a stalking-horse to make their
revolutionary idea of sexuality morally acceptable.

Tom Davis, the author of Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances,
was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1960 and taught for decades at
Skidmore College, where he was also chaplain. In the 1990s, he sat on the national
board of PP and now serves on the board of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive
Choice and on PP’s Clergy Advisory Board. He assures us that this story
has never been told before.

A Religious Duty

Davis admires “the Planned Parenthood clergy” (as he calls them)
for having been “a major force behind a transformation of society’s
view of women seeking abortions,” and even for being a step ahead of PP
itself in the push for abortions: “It was the clergy who were earliest
in the field.” Of course, they were: The mask is always foremost.

It started on May 22, 1967, with a front-page article in The New York Times
in which the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS) announced that it would help women
get abortions. They declared that it was a “religious duty” for them
to assist “all women with problem pregnancies,” that the present
laws compelled “the birth of unwanted, unloved and often deformed children,” and
that “although there may be embryo life in the fetus, there is no
living child upon whom the crime of murder can be committed.” They
assured the public that abortionists were motivated by “compassion” and
lived “by the highest standards of religion.”

Soon its members were working seven-hour days persuading women that an abortion
was not “the most horrible thing in the world,” and by 1969 they
were referring 10,000 women a year for abortions. Since it was already legal
to provide an abortion to save a woman’s life, in December 1969 they began
planning to open a facility where any woman might have an abortion on the “legal
grounds” that two psychiatrists certified she was “suicidal.”

“The subterfuge of the two psychiatrists” became unnecessary in July
1970 when state legislators repealed New York’s abortion laws. The CCS
now opened their own abortion facility on East 73rd Street and “provided
almost all of its referrals.” It remained open 16 hours a day, seven days
a week, doing 100 abortions a day, usually for $200. In the first year alone,
it aborted 26,000 unborn children.

In the five years leading up to Roe v. Wade, the core group of 21 clergy
expanded to about 2,000 clergy and referred over 100,000 women for abortions.
After Roe v. Wade, the clergy’s influence on PP waned for 20 years,
since by the end of 1973 “most mainline Protestant and Jewish denominations
had taken pro-choice stands and were on record as opposing any movement to criminalize
abortion.”

Religious Choice

Davis later formed the Adirondack Religious Coalition for Choice, which arranged
open houses for clergy in PP facilities, and attended public meetings and gave
press conferences on the morality of abortion whenever PP was ready to open a
local abortion facility.

In 1992, PP appointed Davis to its 36-member national board so he could perform
the same magic from coast to coast. The first thing on his agenda was to convince
PP affiliates that the “ religious nature” (emphasis his) of
the pro-life arguments meant that they could only be refuted by equally religious
arguments. Davis cites such an argument, devised by one of the PP clergy: “I
suggest that the sacred fetus is the modern equivalent of the Golden Calf.” (The
unborn child is mentioned just once or twice in Sacred Work.)

Meanwhile, Davis and his cohorts made an idol of PP. At the PP prayer breakfast
in 2005, a clergyman uttered this fervent remark: “If God would give me
another life to live, I would dedicate it entirely to Planned Parenthood.”

After Davis rose to national office, the Clergy Advisory Board soon began publishing
a newsletter called Clergy Voices to defend abortion with theological
and biblical arguments. Next, PP initiated church-sponsored classes in sex education
aimed at children aged 9 to 18, and then PP affiliates across the country each
hired its own chaplain and started having prayer services.

In 1998, PP inaugurated a “prayer breakfast” at its annual conference
that proved highly effective “in demonstrating the religious dimensions” of
the organization, and in 2004 announced it was “hiring a national chaplain” to
be a “visible embodiment” of its “extensive religious support” and
to respond to “religious attacks” on abortion. Could there be a sweeter
disguise for the wolf than such a sheepskin?

Sanger’s Friends

The clergy’s support for abortion was preceded, not surprisingly, by their
support for contraception. Davis explains that from the 1920s to the 1960s, while
Evangelical Protestants stood on the sidelines in the culture war—they “were
not supporters of birth control and certainly not of Planned Parenthood, but
they did not join the struggle to keep contraception out of public health services”—this
was not the case with other clergy.

As far back as 1921, Margaret Sanger, an avowed atheist, corresponded with prominent
clergymen and traveled great distances to speak even briefly and distribute her
literature at church conferences. When, in 1931, a committee of the Federal Council
of Churches (later the National Council of Churches), chaired by Reinhold Niebuhr,
spoke out in favor of birth control, Sanger had a finger in it. Davis informs
us that her collected papers show she was working closely with the Federal Council
of Churches and had raised money for that very committee chaired by Niebuhr.

Also in 1931, the Unitarians and Congregationalists endorsed birth control, and
a Special Commission on Marriage made a breach with the traditional Christian
teaching for Presbyterians while the Lambeth Conference made one for Anglicans.
By the end of the 1930s, the Methodists, too, changed their teaching. By 1946,
the “Planned Parenthood clergy” published a national petition signed
by 3,200 clergymen denouncing religious opponents who refused to allow birth
control in public hospitals and welfare agencies.

As more and more clergy began to attend the openings of her clinics, Sanger’s
prestige rose, for they “brought a measure of sacredness to the movement
that would come to be known as Planned Parenthood.” Davis exclaims that
Sanger had “captured their consciences” and celebrates the victories
they won for her: “It was precisely the religious and moral authority of
these supportive clergy that changed public opinion about birth control.” Until
Roe v. Wade, they would be a “vital part” of PP victories,
for their voices “presumed to speak for the sacred.” (“Presumed”!)

In 1958, the PP clergy succeeded in making tax-funded birth-control services
available in the public hospitals and welfare offices of New York City. In this
big battle, Davis writes, they “neutralized” the “morality
issue” by using religious arguments. They proceeded to use the same strategy
across America, always countering religious objections with religious arguments,
like this one never heard before in the history of the world: that birth control
is “a religious obligation” and its denial to welfare clients something “immoral.”

Neutralized Morality

The PP clergy were launching a sexual revolution, but they pretended that birth-control
services were being limited to the married. As Davis admits, PP affiliates didn’t
ask for marriage licenses, and unmarried women were served “despite its
formal policy.”

He excuses the dishonesty, arguing that PP could not openly change its policy
because they “had to move carefully” not to get “too far ahead
of public sensibilities.” Their “vision” helped to “diminish
the stigma of deeming a woman to be acting improperly and immorally if she chose
to be sexually active before marriage.”

Bring back the stalking-horse! In the early 1960s, the Clergymen’s Advisory
Board began arguing that the “denial of services to the unwed” was
immoral: It was wrong to deny “poor young women the knowledge to protect
themselves from pregnancy and sexual disease.” (The Supreme Court did not
establish the right of unmarried women to contraception until 1972.)

They knew that giving out contraceptives to unmarried women would vastly increase
sexual intercourse outside marriage, but declared in 1965 that promiscuity was
surely better than unwanted children. “The problems of the unwanted child
far overshadow the possible extension of the problems of promiscuity.” In
the mid-1960s, they were already calling unwanted births “compulsory pregnancy.”

These statements link the PP clergy’s enthusiasm for birth control in the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s with their zeal for abortion in 1967 and after. They
assumed, it appears from the story Davis tells, that women ought to be able to
have sex without the consequences. If women had not prevented “compulsory” pregnancies
by contraception, they must be able to end them by abortion.

In his conclusion, Davis states that the PP clergy have recently been energized
again by the battle over embryonic stem-cell research. They believe the new research
will be of great advantage to their own congregations. He reports that “mainline
clergy are acutely aware that these” diseases—the diseases that embryo-destroying
stem-cell research will allegedly cure—“are the very diseases that
are most threatening to their aging congregations.” Aging. He doesn’t
see the irony.

An Old Case

In the last few years, several books have been published by major university
presses all claiming to be blazing a trail by arguing that abortion is a moral
choice, beginning with Leslie Cannold’s The Abortion Myth (Wesleyan
University Press) in 2000. Daniel Boonin, in his A Defense of Abortion
(Cambridge University Press), boasted that he was making the best case “for
the moral permissibility of abortion yet published,” and in Sacred
Rights (Oxford University Press), Daniel Maguire claimed (falsely) to have
proven that abortion was “sacred” in all the world’s major
religions.

It turns out that these scholars are not on the cusp after all. The case for
the morality of abortion has been made to repletion in the past forty years by
the PP clergy. Tom Davis tells the whole story in Sacred Work as if
it were a great triumph. In truth, it is the story of the Judas kiss that, as
always,leads an armed mob against Christ.

Dr. Gardiner’s review of Maguire’s Sacred Rights appeared
in the June 2004 issue, and of Boonin’s A Defense of Abortion in
the July/August 2003 issue. Readers interested in more information on Planned
Parenthood will want to read Dawn Eden’s report from the April 2005 issue,
which can be found at www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-03-057-r.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita, Department of English, John Jay College, City University of New York. She is the author of Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in John Dryden?s The Hind and the Panther (Catholic University of America Press) and a regular reviewer for New Oxford Review.

“Moloch’s Clerics” first appeared in the December 2005 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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